When Chitika co-founders, Venkat Kolluri and Alden DoRosario left Lycos in 2003 to start their own company, they sought a name that would suggest the speed with which its customers would be able to put up ads on their Web sites. Chitika, which means “snap of the fingers” in Telugu (a South Indian language), captured this sentiment and Chitika was born.

Chitika, Inc. (www.chitika.com) is one of the largest search-targeted advertising networks, currently serving over 600 million search driven impressions per month, and growing. For result-driven advertisers and media buyers, Chitika offers a keyword-targeted search marketing program, proven to extend the visibility of SEM campaigns beyond the search engine results page, and into content websites in the Chitika Network. With hundreds of direct advertisers, established media/agency partnerships, and a network of 36,000 content rich websites, Chitika connects today’s leading advertisers and brands with intent-driven search users. For publishers, Chitika is a highly effective monetization service with eCPMs among the highest in the industry.

Chitika attributes its success to knowing when, and more importantly–when NOT — to show an ad. It is common knowledge that the majority of online ad budgets are wasted on mismatched ads that do not convert, and only serve to annoy web users. Chitika’s award winning advertising program is based on proprietary patented behavioral ad targeting technology that tracks, tags, and targets users based on online search activity, session analysis, and affinity to specific offers, promotions and adverts. This technology is the foundation for Chitika’s newest ad units - Chitika | Premium, the industry’s first intelligent collapsing ad units, designed to only show up for select targeted website visitors. Chitika | Premium has led to massive success for the company including doubling their publisher-base to over 36,000 website owners, and increasing their network-wide eCPM by 300 percent. Chitika will turn six this year.